Meanwhile, solar plants in Nevada are, like those in California, the most efficient in the nation, producing electricity at whopping 30 percent of its rated capacity. By contrast, solar in New Jersey has a “capacity factor” of just 12 percent.

Nevada thus benefited more from cheaper gas and high solar capacity factors than relatively modest amount of intermittent solar in an extremely sunny climate.

Integrating solar on to the grid is much easier when to do when you can easily turn natural gas plants up and down to accommodate their intermittency. And it’s much easier to do when it is 12 percent of your electricity instead of 20 percent.

But even at low levels, problems arise. According to the research done by Lion Hirth, solar’s value drops by 50 percent when it gets to just 15 percent of mix. While those values may be different for Nevada, the impact of unreliability is the same.

What ismost remarkable about U.S. states heavy in solar and wind is that electricity prices rose so much given the huge decline in natural gas prices.

Had natural gas prices not plummeted at what was almost the exact same time as the beginning of the large-scale build-out of solar and wind in the United States, price increases in solar and wind heavy states would have been far larger.

Around the world, from Germany and Denmark to Spain and South Australia, even modest penetrations of solar and wind, compared to what advocates claim we will need to decarbonize, lead to large price increases.